


Dissolve

by WithoutAQualmOfConscience



Category: Breaking Bad
Genre: Grimdark, National Public Radio
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-10
Updated: 2018-01-10
Packaged: 2019-03-02 23:48:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13329012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WithoutAQualmOfConscience/pseuds/WithoutAQualmOfConscience
Summary: Is it memorial enough, to see him?





	Dissolve

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SegaBarrett](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/gifts).



> For the BlueChristmeth exchange! I haven't written fanfiction in at least a year, but SegaBarrett was one of my earliest supporters in Weird Todd Fic. Hope this can act as both a look into Lydia's life as well as a compound fic!

Does she think about him? Todd watches the shackled, silent body at work and thinks about Lydia. Does she think about Todd, of course, but also does she think about _him_ ? _It?_ He has to be it here, one of the crew rules. If Jesse Bruce Pinkman (Jesse Bruce, like the hero of an E Street Band song) was a thing with a meaningful sex, a thing with a meaningful manhood, things would be different. But you can’t win men in a trade like a boat, you can’t buy men. Regardless of what some of the crew wishes.

When she saw him, she only shuddered. Todd had been so proud to show her around and all he got in return was the gift of her whole-body repulsion, like he had shown her a shrunken head or his dick. Well, he hopes she wouldn’t viscerally despise his dick. But that’s…

“Hey. Hey, man.” Jesse has stopped. There’s a timer ticking on one of the big ovens, a batch beginning to solidify. “Can you put some music on or something? I’m going out of my fucking mind.” There’s a protracted moment of silence, the two of them staring at each other, before Jesse continues, walking back to start a new round of liquid, “Frankie always has something playing.”  

German death metal or Johnny Cash. That’s what Frankie plays. That’s what Todd knows from having spent any time in Frankie’s jacked-up 1971 Camaro. “Sure.” The radio only gets two stations: The Word of Christ and 98.9 KUNM, New Mexico Public Radio.

Jesse gives Todd a look like silence would have been a better option, but Todd doesn’t change the channel. Lydia, probably, listens to public radio. Lydia probably has an opinion about Fresh Air, about the _Alif The Unseen_ which is a book, by the sound of the interview. Todd tries to pay attention, to learn the plot details, but he’s not a multi-tasker. He can watch Jesse, or he can listen to the radio. And watching Jesse means keeping a hand on a pistol, which takes priority.

“Are you enjoying this?” Jesse asks, not looking up at Todd as he works.

It takes a moment for the question to register. Enjoying what? The scene in front of him? The responsibility? The thought of Lydia thinking about him, taking responsibility, being powerful like this? Jesse can’t mean any of that. That would be a loaded question. That would be back-talk, which is strictly not allowed. “Yeah,” Todd says, keeping his eyes on the subject as he adjusts the volume of the radio, “I love Terry Gross.”

 

* * *

 

Lydia Rodarte-Quayle does not, in fact, think about him. Or it. It-him. These are not the ways she thinks. At any given moment, she is working. At any given moment, she is thinking about her daughter. At any given moment, she is thinking about Gus. Gus, whose loss tastes like acid in her mouth. At any given moment, she is swallowing that acid. The doctors say that reflux is common in women like her. Women who work difficult, high-stress jobs. They say this with a look in their eye that strongly implies that perhaps she should consider a less difficult, less high-stress job which, of course, she never will.

It feels strange to miss a colleague. There is no language for it, no books or films for people whose greatest attachments were to their co-workers. Instead of a mirror for her to see herself in, there is a blank wall. How is she supposed to understand what she feels when she receives a report from Pavel in Brno and her heart leaps to her throat, her stomach a vice around what must be an ulcer at this point. She wants to call a man who no longer exists and say, “Can you believe the incompetence?”

The man who no longer exists would believe it. He would understand. She hopes he knows that it’s a compliment when she thinks that there’s nobody in her life anymore who so intimately understands and equally despairs at the incompetence of the common man. There is nobody as professional around. Even in a multi-national mega-conglomerate for which she oversees every train, plane, bus, and ship, she feels like an island of intelligence, battered wave after wave by people who just don’t understand.

But she presses those feelings down, returns to herself. There, in the report, is a problem. A docking accident in Leer has rendered two shipping containers useless. There, in the river, are now fifteen hundred televisions and seven kilos of The Good Stuff. Pavel’s exact words. On the back of the official fax of course. She assumes he’s shredded the original. She won’t be calling to check.

Seven kilos is only about 80k and if anyone asks she’ll be able to point to the fact that if they had followed the suggestions of their lead contact in Prague and bundled the goods all together like a cable deal they would have lost everything, but that’s still more than she wants to lose in a routine operation. It’s still a loss that’s going to have to be accounted for.

The first person she calls to recover the loss is a buyer in England who says flatly, “You have to recover your own loss, we don’t have anyone making that kind of product on our side.”

The second person is a distributor in St. Louis who explains, voice shaking, “No, I’m sorry, we’re out. If you need to make up the difference, I can get you in touch with our accounting…”

Her heart sinks her her stomach when she realizes this means putting in a call to Jack. And if she’s unlucky, she’ll have to talk to Todd, and Todd will want her to come out and pick the stuff up in person because he has to make everything a goddamn production… Her throat burns in frustration but she picks up the phone.

 

* * *

 

She could be a movie star, her dark hair, her pale skin, her Hollywood vampire presence on the compound so foreign as to be almost alien. Her blue coat, her black high-heels. Todd watches her through binoculars, his stomach pressed to the beer-stained sofa in the rec room of the bunker. She is well within range, merely yards, talking to Jack. In the viewfinders, Todd can focus on her up close, follow the line of her neck like a river in the Rand McNally in the supply case on Jack’s hog. When she turns, when she sees the reflection of the glass, there is a moment of stillness. Bright, rabbit eyes.

“Hey, kid.” Jack pushes through the front door, Lydia in tow. “What are you looking for?”

“Coyotes.” Todd’s voice is tight with anxiety. He can’t bring himself to turn, now. He’s stuck. He’s going to die here, looking out onto the horizon, too embarrassed to admit he was spying on Lydia. Too embarrassed that he doesn’t need to admit, she just knows.

“Coyotes. Can you fucking believe this kid?” Jack rarely laughs, not really. He makes an approximation of laughter designed to be mildly disarming, but anyone who’s spent more than fifteen minutes with him knows that. “Hey, kid, take the nice lady to go pick up her product. It’s a special delivery, apparently.”

“It’s the end of the fiscal quarter.” Lydia corrects him like that means anything.

Todd sets the binoculars down and turns around, stands. It feels inappropriate to see Lydia when he isn’t wearing a nice shirt, a good pair of slacks. How is she supposed to know he’s a professional when he’s wearing faded jeans and a Lynyrd Skynyrd t-shirt? “Is that, uh, tax season?” he asks.

“In a manner of speaking.” She looks like she’s been photoshopped into the scene. In the half-light of the high sun that just manages to sneak through the windows, there are sections of her washed out, sections hidden in shadow. None of those sections belong here, though, with posters of cars and half-naked women. Lydia being here makes those things seem… cheap. “I can’t have a shortfall. This isn’t an unusual situation but I need to have everything balanced by the end of the week.”

“Sure. Sure, no problem. We can help you out. I’ll get…” Hearing himself say it in front of her, with her clean skin and soft hair, he hates himself a little, “The bitch to take care of it.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The cook bitch.” Jack lights a cigarette, holds the door like a gentleman. “He’s in the pit, but we’ll get him. You want a beer or anything while you wait? This takes a few hours. Hope you got your day blocked off.”

Lydia doesn’t flinch. “I do.”

Jack exhales tendrils of smoke. They merge into the dusty air. “Go on, then, Todd, get her to the kitchen, let her supervise.”

“I’d rather not, actually.” She stands perfectly still. “I’m fine to wait here.”

The first time Todd killed a deer, it was in the Gilas, down by Truth or Consequences. The animal didn’t see him. He didn’t make eye contact with it before he shot it, before its legs gave out from under it so dramatically he was sure he’d done something wrong. It was only when he approached it that he saw its face, it’s dark eyes, it’s thin legs. For months after, when he would eat the meat, and it was for months, he pictured its face, the wet nose, the thick tongue. The grace, removed from it so abruptly.

A rattle of chains, a volley of curses, indicates that Jesse has been brought from the pit. Lydia and Todd are suspended, for this moment, in the waiting. How is he supposed to interact with her? What does he have to say to her, looking like this? What he says is, “Do you want to listen to the radio? Um, we get Soul Revival Ministries and NPR. We got records but I’m not sure you’d like them.”

The moment of consideration is painfully extended. She crosses the floor, her path marked by tracks on the floor, like a cowboy in an old fashioned movie. She leans against the pool table, takes her coat off. “Okay. How long does this usually take?”

“Well, one’s finishing, the next batch starts now, probably a couple of hours? It’s, uh, a complicated process.” He wants to prove that he could explain it to her, that he has whole notebooks. That seems condescending, though. She’s been to college. “I think that Diane lady is on now.”

“Diane Rehm.” She looks out the caged-in windows, sees Jesse shuffle by, looks away. “Sure.”

Todd fidgets with the radio until the station comes in clear, then sits on the sofa with his hands on his knees. Lydia continues to look out the window, the view where Jesse was, as though there’s something interesting out there. Something only she can see.

 

* * *

 

80k is nothing. She could hide 80k under her desk, so to speak. She didn’t need to do this. But, as she breathes in the scorched air of the compound, feels the heavy press of Todd’s eyes on her, she reminds herself of the facts. Mike was fond of Jesse, and Gus, of course, was fond of Mike. Through the transitive property, Gus was fond of Jesse. Simple.

She couldn’t go to Mike’s funeral. She couldn’t go to Gus’s, either. Is it memorial enough to see their protege? When the cook is finished, she follows Todd to the industrial kitchen. Jesse, with his head down, presents the packages neatly wrapped.

“Thank you,” she says, and puts them in the Valentino bag she brought specifically for this purpose.

He looked up at her for only a moment, the moment when Jack is tugging him back to the pit, and his eyes are ferociously blue. An open wound over one eyebrow has started to turn yellow, puffy.

“Tend to that,” she says, ostensibly to Jack though she knows Todd will be the one to do it, if anyone. She places a single finger along the wound. It oozes slightly, semi-opaque fluid pooling on her French-tip manicure. “It looks uncomfortable.”

“Yes.” Todd takes her hand and wipes it on his shirt, cleaning her hand. Her eyes don’t leave Jesse’s until he’s pulled away, stumbling.

 

* * *

 

 

“You did so good with the lady,” Kenny is saying, hosing down Jesse that evening, visibly intoxicated. “I think our good boy deserves a treat, doesn’t he?”

Jesse says nothing. Naked, battered, standing in the mud, he’s long ago resorted to silence. What is there to say about what’s going to happen next? The first few times he fought, and hard, but a boot to the head, a hand around the throat, handcuffs…. It’s never a fair fight. It was never designed to be.

Kenny twists the cold water to full blast, enough so that Jesse is doubled over, shaking, ready. Todd isn’t so much interested in the sex part of this whole slave situation. It’s too complicated. There’s too many rules about when you’re allowed to have a hard-on and when you’re not. But he watches Kenny and Jesse with removed interest. He thinks about the way that Lydia touched the wound, about her fearlessness around it. Lydia, who wouldn’t look at much cleaner dead bodies, no shame around a filthy living one.

Is there hope for him yet, then? After all, why did she come all this way for one batch? Todd feels his heart leap, his stomach turning. Did she come here for him? She must have, right? For the first time, he feels himself stirring. And when he takes his turn with Jesse, whose thighs are raw and cold and already sticky, he hopes Lydia knows he’s thinking about her.

 

* * *

 

 

Is it a kindness to preserve him? To keep alive one of the last people to have seen Gus, when Gus was Gus and not a visage so horrible the casket could never have been anything but closed? To sustain the boy who could have been something useful, if he had been smarter, tougher, more like Mike? Isn’t it fitting, to continue their empire with him? Isn’t it still their empire? If the boy doesn’t die, don’t Mike and Gus live?

On the drive back to Houston, bag full of crystal in a plastic bag in the back that she will dispose of later, securely, she tries not to think of these things. She tries to live in the moment. The given moment when she is not thinking of that boy, that place, those men. The given moment where her thoughts are so pure they become acid, burn themselves up. 

 

 


End file.
